“Your son,” she said, and while Justine held Soli’s elbow and looked on with amazement, my mother drew the wolf fur away from my head. “Come closer and look. He has the Lord Pilot’s hair.” Gently, she parted the hair on the side of my head opposite my wound. “Such thick black hair. But sprinkled with strands of red. Like the Lord Pilot’s own. Like the hair of every Soli male, father and son. I’ve been plucking the red from the black. Because I didn’t want you to know. But now you must know. Come here, then, look at your son’s hair!”
I remembered my mother plucking the supposedly “gray” hairs from my head in the Devaki’s cave when she groomed me for lice, and the riddle of my heritage was no longer a riddle. She had plucked red hairs from my head, not gray. Red hairs, the hairs of the Soli lineage that sometimes do not appear until early manhood. During our expedition, perhaps due to the shocks of hunger and cold, I must have begun sprouting red hairs. I was not a bastard, then. I was something much worse. I was—and to this day I have difficulty forming this word even within the most private recesses of my mind—I was a slel–son. I had been called forth to life from Soli’s DNA, from his precious chromosomes, from the very stuff of his selfhood. But it had been my mother who had called me, not he. She had used the information bound inside him to make me, and she was therefore a slel–necker, and who could blame Soli for hating me?
“Look at these red hairs!” my mother said as she ran her fingers through my hair. “Who else but your son? Who would have such hair, black and red?”
“It’s only blood,” Soli said. “His hair is stained with blood, isn’t it?”
“Look closer, then. See? This isn’t blood. You can see, can’t you? You’re his father.”
“No,” he whispered.
“You must help him.”
“No.”
“He’ll die if you—”
“No!” he shouted, and he jerked his arm away from Justine. It must have been clear to him that if I was really his son, then Katharine was my sister. “You knew,” he said to my mother. “All this time, since the City, Katharine and Mallory...together! And you knew?”
“Oh, no!” Justine said.
“Don’t blame my son,” my mother said. “Blame Katharine. She was a scryer. She knew Mallory was her brother. And she bore his son anyway.”
“What!” Soli yelled.
“The child. It was Mallory’s son, not Liam’s.”
“No!”
Yes, Soli, I wanted to say. I am your son, Katharine was my sister, and her son was my son, your grandson, and the chain of crime and horror goes on and on. But I could not speak; I could not move. I could only listen.
“Katharine bewitched him,” my mother said. She was very angry, and the words spilled out like poison. “She knew Mallory was her brother. Who but that witch of a scryer would mate with her own brother?”
“Why?” Soli asked.
“I asked Katharine why, but she wouldn’t tell me.”
“You asked her?”
“She was a witch, your daughter. A damn witch.”
“You accused her of being a witch? Then you killed her, didn’t you? Yes, you killed her.”
“She deserved to die.”
Soli stood motionless for a moment, and there was madness in his eyes. And then he fell into one of his rare, terrible rages, and he slapped my mother away from me. He tried to kill her. (Or rather, to execute her, as he would later claim.) He tried to choke her to death even as she tore his face to meat with her fingernails and nearly crushed his stones with her knee. “Filthy sielnecker!” Soli cried out. “You knew!”
I tried to rise, but as in a nightmare, I could not move.
There was horror then, crime heaped upon crime. Justine came to her sister’s rescue. She peeled Soli’s fingers from my mother’s throat. Soli struck out in rage. I do not believe he knew what he was doing. Once, twice, thrice, he struck, smashing my mother’s chest bones, breaking Justine’s teeth and jaw. My mother collapsed to the packed–snow floor, writhing. Justine moaned and gagged and spat out bloody tooth fragments. “Oh, Soli!” she wept, and blood flowed from her lips, but Soli was mad, and he tried to kill his beautiful wife. He broke her arm, broke her nose, and worst of all, he broke the hard, pure love she had always had for him. The mad Lord Pilot, whose face resembled a shagshay carcass after a feast, stared down at Justine as his rage slowly drained away. He pointed at my mother. “You should have let me kill her!” he roared. “This filthy slel–necker!” He came over to my bed and pulled the furs over my head, hiding my hair and most of my face. “He’s not my son,” he said.
When Soli came to his right mind, he was ashamed of what he had done. He tried to apologize to Justine, tried to help her. But she would not be helped.
“No, no,” she said, “leave me alone.” Blood bubbled from her nose, and it was very hard for her to speak. However, she managed to force out, “I told you thirty years ago, never again, and I’m sorry for you; sorry for us, I truly am, but how can I trust you now, because if you can do this, you can do anything, and what will I do now?” She covered her face with her hands and cried out, “Oh, Leopold, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!”
“You’re still my wife,” he said.
“No, no!”
“We’ve been friends for more than a hundred years.”
The presumptuous tone of his voice made Justine angry (and my aunt rarely suffered from that ugly emotion), and she said, “I thought we were friends, but I was wrong.”
Soli stared at the wall of the hut. Then he made a fist and punched out one of the snow blocks, and the wind spilled in. He looked out of this make–shift window, pointing at Bardo’s sled where his huge body lay strapped beneath the furs. For a long time he had kept his silence concerning Justine’s and Bardo’s blossoming friendship, but now he was sick with jealousy, so he said, “Yes, now you have new friends. Dead friends.”
What happened next is sad to tell. Soli’s rage had left him, but the madness had grown worse. He did not realize how badly Justine and my mother were injured. He accused his wife—wrongly—of contemplating adultery. Justine was weeping into her hands, and he took this as an admission of guilt. He told her that he could never forgive her. Since the jammer would be arriving in four more days, he said, it was time to drive the sleds south to our rendezvous, or else a storm might make us miss our ship. When my mother started talking again about drilling holes in my head and Justine would not look at him, he threw his furs onto a sled, harnessed the dogs, and whispered, “Yes, drill if you want to drill, do whatever you want and meet the jammer at the rendezvous if you want to return to the City. What does it matter?”
After he was gone, my mother wrapped Justine’s face in newl skins. She set her arm and splinted it. She did this, and all the while her broken ribs rubbed and clicked and scratched at her lungs, causing her great pain. That night she made a flint drill and opened my head to let the blood out. Probably because of her drilling I did not die out on the ice. Somehow—to this day it seems miraculous that my mother and Justine were able to do so—somehow the next morning they lifted me onto one of the sleds. Somehow, they managed to lash Bardo’s sled and mine in tandem and drive them across the miles of sheet snow. It was a tortuous journey, a killing journey. I remember my mother screaming at every bump or divot in the snow; I remember the wind and cold and pain; I remember screaming myself that my head hurt and that Soli was not my father, and many, many other incomprehensible things.
Later the next evening, under Pelablinka’s bubbling white glister, we reached the rendezvous point. There was a single snow dome sitting alone on the immense white bowl of the sea. Soli was there waiting, but he would not come out of his small hut, nor would he speak to anyone. My mother and Justine built another hut for themselves and for me. Even though I fell into a deep coma, my mother continued opening my head. “He’ll live,” she kept telling Justine, “if only we can get him home in time.”
We waited three days for the windjammer, three days and ni
ghts of wind and pain. Finally it came. The journey back to the City was quick; our return to the glittering spires and the crowds of professionals lining the Hollow Fields was glorious. (At least it was glorious until my mother and Justine stepped off the windjammer and our tragedy became well known.) But I was blind to glory and almost beyond pain. They took me to a dark room beneath the Fields where pilots are brought back to their youth. There the cutters went into my skull. Someone announced that despite my mother’s truly delicate and remarkable efforts to save me, Seif’s rock had crushed and ruined parts of my brain. After a time, someone else announced that all our sufferings had been pointless because the rescued Devaki plasm had proved to be little different than that of modern human beings. The master splicers had not found the Ieldra’s message inscribed within their DNA. The secret of life remained undiscovered, perhaps undiscoverable, veiled and hidden, eternally mysterious. The Lord Cetic proclaimed that it was a pity our search had been in vain. “It’s a pity too much of Mallory’s brain is gone for us to bring him back. A pity he must pay the final price for nothing.”
There must always come a time when our luck runs out, when the ticking of the clock must finally stop. Neither the cetics nor the cutters nor the imprimaturs could help me. To preserve a flawed, damaged brain would have been a crime, and for me it would have been hell, the everness of a life without sound or sight or love or hope. Far better to embrace fate at the right time, and it would be far easier, like falling down a black, spiral stairway longer than the one in the Timekeeper’s Tower, the stairway without light, without end. And so in a small, dark room almost within sight of Resa’s Morning Towers, on a cold, snowless day in deep winter, I turned my gaze inward to the deeper darkness and fell. To this day I have not stopped falling.
In Neverness I died my first death.
17
Agathange
Much of death depends on state of mind.
Maurice Gabriel–Thomas, Swarming Centuries Programmer
Who can know what it is to be a god? Who can say which of the carked races of man—the Elf–men of Anya and the Hoshi, the Newvanian Arhats and all the others—have attained to the godly, and which are extremely long–lived women and men wearing bizarre and sometimes beautiful bodies? How much wisdom must a race acquire before it is deemed worthy of the godhead? How much knowledge, how much power, how final an immortality? Are the god–kings of the Eriades cluster—they who built a ringworld around Primula Luz—are these human computers merely clever men or something more profound? I do not know. I know little of the art of eschatology, of its tidy classifications and endless debates. Kolenya Mor argues that what really matters is not the status of a race, but its direction. Are the Agathanians, for instance, moving godward or have they reached an evolutionary dead–end? To me, who came as a corpse to the mysterious planet called Agathange, there was only one criterion upon which to judge the question of Agathanian godhead, and it was this: How much of the great secret did they know? Did they, who swam through Agathange’s warm, eternally blue waters, possess the secret of life and an answer to death?
I have said that Neverness is the most beautiful city on all the planets, but Icefall, while beautiful in its own frigid way, is not the most beautiful of the planets. Agathange is the most beautiful planet. As seen from deep space, she is a glittering blue and white jewel floating in a diamond–etched bowl of black amber. (I should mention that I had my first glimpse of the whole planet only after my resurrection and departure. Upon my arrival, of course, I saw nothing because I was dead.) The stars surrounding Agathange swim with light; looking upward from the luminous, lapping waves the sky is brilliant. Only on cloudy nights is the sea dark, and even then it is the darkness of quicksilver and cobalt rather than that of obsidian or black ink. The sea—the single ocean which covers all the planet except for a few small islands—is warm and peaceful. It teems with fish and other sea life. Schools of taofish and konani numbering in the tens of millions swim through the sparkling waters of the shoals and shallows, while in the deeps of the true ocean, the larger ranita hunt other fish which have no names. Flying fish, perhaps drunk with the sheer delight of racing through the tropical whorls and hollows, school in such profusion that the sea’s surface for miles often seems aquiver with a carpet of arching silver. It was this overwhelming abundance of life, I think, which led the first Agathanians to cark their human bodies into seal–like shapes, to escape into the whisperless depths and fill the ocean with their mutable, godling children.
“Properly, the Agathanians are god–men, not gods,” as Kolenya Mor later told me. “They do not seek personal immortality; they do not desire to escape the prison of matter, as the Ieldra did, nor do they attempt to remake the universe to their liking.” They had come to Agathange, she said, on the first wave of the Swarming. The most common story of their origin—and the one that happens to be true—is this: Long ago, at the end of the Holocaust’s third interlude, a group of ecologists fled Old Earth in one of the first deepships. With them they carried the krydda−preserved zygotes of narwhals, dolphins, sperm whales and other extinct sea mammals. When they discovered a world of fecund oceans and sweet, untainted air, they quickened the zygotes and nursed the baby whales through their childhood terrors of sharks and other predators. When the whales had grown—and grown—and had absorbed the oceans of whalesong preserved within the ship’s computer, the ecologists released them into the blue bed of the sea. They saw how happy the animals were, and they held a celebration, drinking casks of centuries–old wine and smoking a seaweed they discovered and named toalache. Days later they came to their right senses. They were envious and sad because they could never know the joy of the whales they saved. The master ecologist said that man, with his monkey hands and desire to own pieces of land and other things, had nearly ruined the Earth. Man was an unfortunate terrestrial species flawed by form and by nature. Ah, but what if that form and nature were changed? And so the ecologists smoked their toalache, and they saw visions of their life as it could be, and they bred their children to have pointed noses and flippers and fluked tails. They named their watery world Agathange, which means, “place where all things move towards the ultimate good.” There, for thousands of years, the Agathanians carked and bred their children, whether to ultimate good or evolutionary abomination not even the eschatologists can say.
Perhaps seeking her own ultimate good (or perhaps simply because she had given me life and she loved me), my mother determined to bear my ruined, krydda−preserved body to Agathange. She knew in detail the story of Shanidar. Once, the god–men had restored him to life—could they do less for a pilot of our famous Order? She found passage on a deepship traveling out beyond the Purple Cluster. She surrendered my corpse to a group of Agathanians (actually, they were more of a family) who called themselves the Host of Restorers. She was then invited to leave Agathange, to wait in one of the tiny hotels which orbit the planet, while the Restorers worked—or failed to work—their miracles.
She waited a long time. The painstaking repair of my brain lasted the greater part of two years. (I am speaking of Neverness years, of course. On Agathange there is only one season—forever spring—and the many hosts measure time in terms of their degree of advancement towards ultimate planetary consciousness. But I am getting ahead of my story.) For most of the first year I lay suspended beneath the buoyant sea while Balusilustalu and others restored parts of my brain with temporary prosthetics. These clumsy, cortically implanted biochips were only meant to get my heart and limbs and lungs moving again; the tiny computers were too crude to help me regain much of my speech function, nor was I able to remember large portions of my life. My first thought after awakening among a host of a thousand, black, gliding, slippery bodies was that I had gone over to the other side of day, and the doffels of all the seals I had killed had come to ask me why I was insane.
It is a truism, a discovery of the ancient scryers, that any civilization made by gods will appear to humans as incomprehensi
ble and miraculous. How, then, can I describe the Agathanian miracle when I still do not comprehend all the details, the complexities of their fabulous technology? I will tell of what I know: The ocean was full of created organisms, many of which were one–third computer, one–third robot, one–third living thing. Most of these tiny tools were microscopic in size. There were programmed bacteria of every size and shape, eubacteria, spherical cocci, and spirochetes with their whiplike tails. They floated among the engineered phytoplankton; the water was rich with flagellates, single–celled and colonial algae, diatoms with their beautiful symmetry, the little jewels of the sea spinning out silicates or carbon fibers or whatever else they had been designed to manufacture. Mostly though, the Agathanians were concerned with the manipulation of proteins. The entire ocean was a stew pot for making, dissolving, and reassembling proteins. It was an ancient technology: Restriction enzymes, which were nothing more than protein machines, were used to cut, rearrange and splice bits of a bacterium’s DNA. But the Agathanians, being gods, had unravelled more of the mysteries of DNA than our City’s splicers ever would. They had created wholly new forms of DNA. And in the trillions of cells of the created organisms all through the waters of Agathange, the DNA was transcribed, its information read and copied into RNA. And the RNA instructed the cells’ natural molecular machines, the ribosomes, to build proteins: new enzymes, hormones, muscle protein, hemoglobin, neurologic circuitry to weave into the minuscule computer–brains of new bacteria, protein of every conceivable shape and function, a potentially infinite variety of protein.
“The variety of life is endless,” Balusilustalu would say to me one day. “What do human beings know of life? So little, so little, ha, ha! On Agathange even some of the bacteria—ah, but are they bacteria or are they computers, do you know?—even the pyramid bacteria are intelligent. There are infinite possibilities.”
As on other worlds, the ocean swarmed with copepods, salps, annelid worms, sponges, and jellyfish, and with squid, swallowers, sharks and other fishes higher on the food chain. But in the water there were other things as well, bizarrely shaped animals which looked like crushing or cutting machines, and there were machines which looked like animals. The Agathanians made these things, or I should say, they designed assembler enzymes to make them. (I will call them assemblers because they were really enzyme–like machines.) The ribosomes of programmed bacteria pumped out assemblers designed for specific tasks. Assemblers sifted through the water, constructing large molecules by seizing and bonding bits of carbon or silicon, atoms of gold, copper, sodium, any and every element dissolved into the warm, salty stew of the ocean. Lipid molecules, hormones, chlorophyll, and new twists of DNA—the assemblers welded them into organisms which were half–plant, half–animal. Assemblers bonded carbon atoms layer upon layer, and so the sea–nymphs spun their networks of diamond fibers, building their beautiful, glittering nests. Assemblers bonded atom to atom, sticking them together like marbles with glue. The Agathanians could—and did—assemble atoms into any arrangement permitted by natural law. They linked molecular conductors to voltage sources within living tissues and shaped electric fields directly and in new ways. If they had wanted to, they could have built a city beneath the waters; I believe they could have made a whale as big as a deepship; perhaps they could have woven circuitry into a whale’s nerves and muscles and created a living lightship to sail the cold currents of space. There was nothing they could not fabricate, disassemble and re–create molecule by molecule, neuron by neuron, including a man.
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